Virat Kohli & Toss
It’s the third time in the series that England are chasing. This is because Kohli has lost all three tosses. It’s an unlucky streak but by no means unprecedented. However, this is not the first toss losing streak of Kohli’s career as a captain and it just feels like Kohli loses far more tosses than he wins. There are matches we all recall where a toss mattered and Kohli would end up on the losing side more often than not. Is that just conformation bias or is their some substance to the feeling?
It had me wondering as well and I began clicking some buttons on the internet. Result? Your gut feel is right. Kohli is unlucky. But just how unlucky? The outcome hit me like a bowler trying to stop a full blooded Kohli drive. Turns out Virat the captain is as much an outlier as Virat the batsman, even a shade more perhaps. So much that the memes about him wishing someone and immediately that person’s performance going downhill aren’t out of place.
For the 45 players who have flipped the coin at least a 100 times, Virat Kohli is the worst captain at it, with a success % of 42.5%, followed closely by Viv Richards. Even if we reduce the filter to 80 matches, he is still in second place behind Javed Miandad. This would be bad in any sense but that he has managed this over 200 coin tosses of equal probability (no bat toss nonsense), this goes from bad to absurd. Ironically, the two best at it are former and current superstars of his IPL team: Rahul Dravid and ABD. It is time for Virat to either call up ABD again or perform a rain dance.
Below is the list of top 5 captains with best and worst toss success rate with over 100 matches.
Name, Matches captained, Tosses Won, Toss Success Rate
Virat Kohli, 200, 85, 42.5%
Viv Richards, 155,66, 42.6%
Michael Clarke, 139, 62, 44.6%
Brian Lara, 172, 77, 44.8%
Sarfaraz Ahmed, 100, 45, 45%
Rahul Dravid, 104, 61, 58.7%
AB De Villiers, 124, 71, 57.3%
William Porterfield, 172, 98, 57%
Mohammad Azharuddin, 221, 125, 56.6%
Sanath Jayasuriya, 156, 87, 55.8%
Going by probability, the chances of winning 85 or less tosses out of 200 are 2%. This means that 98% captains would fare better than Virat across ages. This is as much an outlier as his batting.
